I was asked to draw the Helena Bertinelli Huntress as she appears in the cartoon "Batman: The Brave & The Bold." Interestingly, Helena's costume in the show was that of her predecessor/successor's Helena Wayne. It's one of those silly little costume that fit the tone of the show but is a little funny when applied to the Bertinelli character since it doesn't quite match her personality. Still, I'm glad that she made it into that cartoon and she remained one of the more interesting characters even if she was characterized as the "hot teacher." I've seen very few episodes from the series but the controversial Birds of Prey episode remains the best episode I've seen. I think Huntress came out nicely here though and I tried to capture her 'essence' from the series.

Impractical though it may be (seriously, a cleavage-bearing lavender and magenta costume?! What crack was she smoking??), it certainly set the tone for the aesthetic all future incarnations would have. Also, Helena didn't make her first appearance in a JSA comic but rather an issue of DC Super Stars.

The current Silver Age aesthetic that DC has been slowly implementing since Hal Jordan was resurrected is largely in part due to Geoff John's rise to power. He notoriously has a fetish for the Silver Age.

Paul Levitz is also created Helena Wayne. Of course, it could have been that he was hired BECAUSE of that fact and they wanted someone who would possess that nostalgia factor. Ironically, World's Finest remains one of the few titles at DC right now with a lot of complaints. Catwoman, however, has it beat. All of Catwoman's fans have been demanding Ann Nocenti to be fired due to her butchering of Catwoman's character.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had him write the storyline because they thought the switch would be taken better if her creator wrote it. Personally, I would've had the two Helenas end up switching Earths.

I haven't read Catwoman, so I can't really say where the reaction is justified or not. I did like Nocenti's Longshot mini, which I got in trade.

According to the writer of Earth-2, apparently there's a rule in place that there can't be the same character present on Earth-0 (the New 52) and on Earth-2. This is why Helena Bertinelli was killed off and why some are thinking that the Earth-0 Supergirl may be killed off (because Power Girl was Earth-2's Supergirl) despite the fact that Earth-0 Supergirl is superior to the Power Girl from Earth-2 in the new continuity. After all, Supergirl manages to keep her clothes on during fights.

Most long-time and hardcore Catwoman fans are despondent about what Ann Nocenti has done with Catwoman. Judd Winick also came under fire when he wrote the title (I largely feel he doesn't know how to write female characters) but Ann Nocenti has admitted she's read very little of the character and most feel that her exposure to the character is only from Batman Returns since she's decided to rip off Tim Burton's origin for the character for the new continuity.

I don't usually join in on conversations if I'm not commenting on the art (which is quite lovely, btw), but the 'no doppelgängers' rule was not the reason Helena Bertinelli was retconned out of existence. She was retconned because she was originally created in 1989 as a new origin for the Huntress since the original Helena Wayne could no longer function within the context of the post-Crisis continuity. Since DC decided to reinstate Earth-2 for the New 52, they returned all of their original JSA/Earth-2 characters (sans Black Canary who was made a permanent resident of Earth-0) back to their own continuity, which included Huntress and Power Girl. With that, they reinstated the Huntress as Helena Wayne and completely scrapped Helena Bertinelli's origin, except for the name which she kept as her 'Earth-0 identity.' This has been consistently stated by DC editorial and Huntress co-creator Paul Levitz, and was even acknowledged by James Robinson in a ComicVine podcast. The Helena Bertinelli that existed in the New 52 was now just a person that Helena Wayne got her 'new name from,' but the Huntress that we knew as Helena Bertinelli was now a creation of Helena Wayne's making.

That being said, I don't think DC made the right approach with the Huntress in either the Crisis or Flashpoint reboots for a wide array of reasons, but that is nevertheless the real reason the loss of Helena Bertinelli happened. If this was really about not having 'two of the same character on two Earths,' there literally wouldn't be an Earth-2 Flash, an Earth-2 Green Lantern, and more recently a new Earth-2 Batman with different people in the roles. Helena Bertinelli doesn't count as a doppelgänger of Helena Wayne because she is not a duplicate Helena Wayne. She is/was a character with a different enough history from Helena Wayne to function as a counterpart of Helena Wayne on the mainstream Earth. If anything, this says more about DC's double standards in their handling of both male and female characters, with the latter usually being the ones that get screwed over by a reboot than the former.

I wouldn't be so sure. Three-quarters or more of the people who comment on art clearly don't read the artists comments and I've had a handful of people who will comment on a journal without actually reading the content instead using the title as a way of "guessing" what I said. It's kind of sad.